Ideas of Good and evil ebook

Chapters include: What Is ‘Popular Poetry’?; Speaking To The Psaltery; Magic; The Happiest Of The Poets; The Philosophy Of Shelley’s Poetry; At Stratford-On-Avon; William Blake And The Imagination; William Blake And His Illustrations To The Divine Comedy; Symbolism In Painting; The Symbolism Of Poetry; The Theatre; The Celtic Element In Literature; The Autumn Of The Body; The Moods; The Body Of; The Father Christian Rosencrux; The Return Of Ulysses; Ireland And The Arts; The Galway Plains; and, Emotion Of Multitude.

The
Philosophy Of Shelley’s Poetry- 1. His
Ruling Ideas- 2. His Ruling Symbols

At
Stratford-On-Avon

William Blake And
The Imagination

William
Blake And His Illustrations To The Divine Comedy- 1. His Opinions Upon Art- 2. His Opinions On
Dante- 3. The Illustrations Of Dante

Symbolism In
Painting

The Symbolism Of
Poetry

The Theatre

The Celtic Element
In Literature

The Autumn Of The
Body

The Moods

The Body Of The
Father Christian Rosencrux

The Return Of
Ulysses

Ireland And The
Arts

The Galway
Plains

Emotion Of
Multitude

What Is ‘Popular Poetry’?

What Is ‘Popular Poetry’?

I think it was a Young Ireland
Society that set my mind running on ‘popular poetry.’
We used to discuss everything that was known to us about Ireland,
and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We had no
Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in
English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at
that time the dates of the birth and death, and quoted the chief
poems, of men whose names you have not heard, and perhaps of some
whose names I have forgotten. I knew in my heart that the most of
them wrote badly, and yet such romance clung about them, such a
desire for Irish poetry was in all our minds, that I kept on
saying, not only to others but to myself, that most of them wrote
well, or all but well. I had read Shelley and Spenser and had tried
to mix their styles together in a pastoral play which I have not
come to dislike much, and yet I do not think Shelley or Spenser
ever moved me as did these poets. I thought one day, I can remember
the very day when I thought it, ‘If somebody could make a
style which would not be an English style and yet would be musical
and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him, and we
would have a really great school of ballad poetry in Ireland. If
these poets, who have never ceased to fill the newspapers and the
ballad-books with their verses, had a good tradition they would
write beautifully and move everybody as they move me.’ Then a
little later on I thought, ‘If they had something else to
write about besides political opinions, if more of them would write
about the beliefs of the people like Allingham, or about old
legends like Ferguson, they would find it easier to get a
style.’ Then, with a deliberateness that still surprises me,
for in my heart of hearts I have never been quite certain that one
should be more than an artist, that even patriotism is more than an
impure desire in an artist, I set to work to find a style and
things to write about that the ballad writers might be the
better.

They are no better, I think, and my
desire to make them so was, it may be, one of the illusions Nature
holds before one, because she knows that the gifts she has to give
are not worth troubling about. It is for her sake that we must stir
ourselves, but we would not trouble to get out of bed in the
morning, or to leave our chairs once we are in them, if she had not
her conjuring bag. She wanted a few verses from me, and because it
would not have seemed worth while taking so much trouble to see my
books lie on a few drawing-room tables, she filled my head with
thoughts of making a whole literature, and plucked me out of the
Dublin art schools where I should have stayed drawing from the
round, and sent me into a library to read bad translations from the
Irish, and at last down into Connaught to sit by turf fires. I
wanted to write ‘popular poetry’ like those Irish
poets, for I believed that all good literatures were popular, and
even cherished the fancy that the Adelphi melodrama, which I had
never seen, might be good literature, and I hated what I called the
coteries. I thought that one must write without care, for that was
of the coteries, but with a gusty energy that would put all
straight if it came out of the right heart. I had a conviction,
which indeed I have still, that one’s verses should hold, as
in a mirror, the colours of one’s own climate and scenery in
their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of the
reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days
of setting things right, not as I should now by making my rhythms
faint and nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a
certain wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a
board. I felt indignant with Matthew Arnold because he complained
that somebody, who had translated Homer into a ballad measure, had
tried to write epic to the tune of Yankee Doodle. It seemed to me
that it did not matter what tune one wrote to, so long as that
gusty energy came often enough and strongly enough. And I delighted
in Victor Hugo’s book upon Shakespeare, because he abused
critics and coteries and thought that Shakespeare wrote without
care or premeditation and to please everybody. I would indeed have
had every illusion had I believed in that straightforward logic, as
of newspaper articles, which so tickles the ears of the
shopkeepers; but I always knew that the line of Nature is crooked,
that, though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can, the
rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.

From that day to this I have been
busy among the verses and stories that the people make for
themselves, but I had been busy a very little while before I knew
that what we call popular poetry never came from the people at all.
Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and Macaulay in his
Lays, and Scott in his longer poems are the poets of the middle
class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten tradition which
binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of themselves, to
the beginning of time and to the foundation of the world, and who
have not learned the written tradition which has been established
upon the unwritten. I became certain that Burns, whose greatness
has been used to justify the littleness of others, was in part a
poet of the middle class, because though the farmers he sprang from
and lived among had been able to create a little tradition of their
own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech, they had been
divided by religious and political changes from the images and
emotions which had once carried their memories backward thousands
of years. Despite his expressive speech which sets him above all
other popular poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty
of ideas, the imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most
typical expression is in Longfellow. Longfellow has his popularity,
in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one
needs nothing but his verses to understand it. No words of his
borrow their beauty from those that used them before, and one can
get all that there is in story and idea without seeing them, as if
moving before a half-faded curtain embroidered with kings and
queens, their loves and battles and their days out hunting, or else
with holy letters and images of so great antiquity that nobody can
tell the god or goddess they would commend to an unfading memory.
Poetry that is not popular poetry presupposes, indeed, more than it
says, though we, who cannot know what it is to be disinherited,
only understand how much more, when we read it in its most typical
expressions, in the Epipsychidion of Shelley, or in Spenser’s
description of the gardens of Adonis, or when we meet the
misunderstandings of others. Go down into the street and read to
your baker or your candlestick-maker any poem which is not popular
poetry. I have heard a baker, who was clever enough with his oven,
deny that Tennyson could have known what he was writing when he
wrote ‘Warming his five wits, the white owl in the belfry
sits,’ and once when I read out Omar Khayyam to one of the
best of candlestick-makers, he said, ‘What is the meaning of
“we come like water and like wind we go”?’ Or go
down into the street with some thought whose bare meaning must be
plain to everybody; take with you Ben Jonson’s ‘Beauty
like sorrow dwelleth everywhere,’ and find out how utterly
its enchantment depends on an association of beauty with sorrow
which written tradition has from the unwritten, which had it in its
turn from ancient religion; or take with you these lines in whose
bare meaning also there is nothing to stumble over, and find out
what men lose who are not in love with Helen.

‘Brightness falls from the
air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.’

I pick my examples at random, for I
am writing where I have no books to turn the pages of, but one need
not go east of the sun or west of the moon in so simple a
matter.

On the other hand, when Walt
Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition
for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the
candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by
chance. Nature, which cannot endure emptiness, has made them gather
conventions which cannot disguise their low birth though they copy,
as from far off, the dress and manners of the well-bred and the
well-born. The gatherers mock all expression that is wholly unlike
their own, just as little boys in the street mock at
strangely-dressed people and at old men who talk to themselves.

There is only one kind of good
poetry, for the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes the
written tradition, does not differ in kind from the true poetry of
the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition. Both are
alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not
understanding, and both, instead of that manifest logic, that clear
rhetoric of the ‘popular poetry,’ glimmer with thoughts
and images whose ‘ancestors were stout and wise,’
‘anigh to Paradise’ ‘ere yet men knew the gift of
corn.’ It may be that we know as little of their descent as
men knew of ‘the man born to be a king’ when they found
him in that cradle marked with the red lion crest, and yet we know
somewhere in the heart that they have been sung in temples, in
ladies’ chambers, and our nerves quiver with a recognition
they were shaped to by a thousand emotions. If men did not remember
or half remember impossible things, and, it may be, if the worship
of sun and moon had not left a faint reverence behind it, what Aran
fisher-girl would sing

‘It is late last night the
dog was speaking of you; the snipe was speaking of you in her deep
marsh. It is you are the lonely bird throughout the woods; and that
you may be without a mate until you find me.

‘You promised me and you said
a lie to me, that you would be before me where the sheep are
flocked. I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you; and I
found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

‘You promised me a thing that
was hard for you, a ship of gold under a silver mast; twelve towns
and a market in all of them, and a fine white court by the side of
the sea.

‘You promised me a thing that
is not possible; that you would give me gloves of the skin of a
fish; that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird, and a
suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

‘My mother said to me not to
be talking with you, to-day or to-morrow or on Sunday. It was a bad
time she took for telling me that, it was shutting the door after
the house was robbed....

‘You have taken the east from
me, you have taken the west from me, you have taken what is before
me and what is behind me; you have taken the moon, you have taken
the sun from me, and my fear is great you have taken God from
me.’

The Gael of the Scottish islands
could not sing his beautiful song over a bride, had he not a memory
of the belief that Christ was the only man who measured six feet
and not a little more or less, and was perfectly shaped in all
other ways, and if he did not remember old symbolical
observances

I bathe thy palms
In showers of wine,
In the cleansing fire,
In the juice of raspberries,
In the milk of honey.
·····
Thou art the joy of all joyous things,
Thou art the light of the beam of the sun,
Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,
Thou art the surpassing pilot star,
Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
Thou art the step of the horse of the plain,
Thou art the grace of the sun rising,
Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.
The lovely likeness of the Lord
Is in thy pure face,
The loveliest likeness that was upon earth.

I soon learned to cast away one
other illusion of ‘popular poetry.’ I learned from the
people themselves, before I learned it from any book, that they
cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea of a
cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly
separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond of words and
verses that keep half their secret to themselves. Indeed, it is
certain that before the counting-house had created a new class and
a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art
and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut
and the cloister, the art of the people was as closely mingled with
the art of the coteries as was the speech of the people that
delighted in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in words
full of far-off suggestion, with the unchanging speech of the
poets.

Now I see a new generation in
Ireland which discusses Irish literature and history in Young
Ireland societies, and societies with newer names, and there are
far more than when I was a boy who would make verses for the
people. They have the help, too, of a vigorous journalism, and this
journalism sometimes urges them to desire the direct logic, the
clear rhetoric, of ‘popular poetry.’ It sees that
Ireland has no cultivated minority, and it does not see, though it
would cast out all English things, that its literary ideal belongs
more to England than to other countries. I have hope that the new
writers will not fall into its illusion, for they write in Irish,
and for a people the counting-house has not made forgetful. Among
the seven or eight hundred thousand who have had Irish from the
cradle, there is, perhaps, nobody who has not enough of the
unwritten tradition to know good verses from bad ones, if he have
enough mother-wit. Among all that speak English in Australia, in
America, in Great Britain, are there many more than the ten
thousand the prophet saw, who have enough of the written tradition
education has set in room of the unwritten to know good verses from
bad ones, even though their mother-wit has made them Ministers of
the Crown or what you will? Nor can things be better till that ten
thousand have gone hither and thither to preach their faith that
‘the imagination is the man himself,’ and that the
world as imagination sees it is the durable world, and have won men
as did the disciples of Him who

His seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.

- 1901.

Speaking To The Psaltery

Speaking To The Psaltery

I

I have always known that there was
something I disliked about singing, and I naturally dislike print
and paper, but now at last I understand why, for I have found
something better. I have just heard a poem spoken with so delicate
a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for its meaning,
that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people to learn
the art I would never open a book of verses again. A friend, who
was here a few minutes ago, has sat with a beautiful stringed
instrument upon her knee, her fingers passing over the strings, and
has spoken to me some verses from Shelley’s Skylark and Sir
Ector’s lamentation over the dead Launcelot out of the Morte
d’Arthur and some of my own poems. Wherever the rhythm was
most delicate, wherever the emotion was most ecstatic, her art was
the most beautiful, and yet, although she sometimes spoke to a
little tune, it was never singing, as we sing to-day, never
anything but speech. A singing note, a word chanted as they chant
in churches, would have spoiled everything; nor was it reciting,
for she spoke to a notation as definite as that of song, using the
instrument, which murmured sweetly and faintly, under the spoken
sounds, to give her the changing notes. Another speaker could have
repeated all her effects, except those which came from her own
beautiful voice that would have given her fame if the only art that
gives the speaking voice its perfect opportunity was as well known
among us as it was known in the ancient world.

II

Since I was a boy I have always
longed to hear poems spoken to a harp, as I imagined Homer to have
spoken his, for it is not natural to enjoy an art only when one is
by oneself. Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to
somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if
we could all listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved. Images
used to rise up before me, as I am sure they have arisen before
nearly everybody else who cares for poetry, of wild-eyed men
speaking harmoniously to murmuring wires while audiences in
many-coloured robes listened, hushed and excited. Whenever I spoke
of my desire to anybody they said I should write for music, but
when I heard anything sung I did not hear the words, or if I did
their natural pronunciation was altered and their natural music was
altered, or it was drowned in another music which I did not
understand. What was the good of writing a love-song if the singer
pronounced love, ‘lo-o-o-o-o-ve,’ or even if he said
‘love,’ but did not give it its exact place and weight
in the rhythm? Like every other poet, I spoke verses in a kind of
chant when I was making them, and sometimes, when I was alone on a
country road, I would speak them in a loud chanting voice, and feel
that if I dared I would speak them in that way to other people. One
day I was walking through a Dublin street with the Visionary I have
written about in The Celtic Twilight, and he began speaking his
verses out aloud with the confidence of those who have the inner
light. He did not mind that people stopped and looked after him
even on the far side of the road, but went on through poem after
poem. Like myself, he knew nothing of music, but was certain that
he had written them to a manner of music, and he had once asked
somebody who played on a wind instrument of some kind, and then a
violinist, to write out the music and play it. The violinist had
played it, or something like it, but had not written it down; but
the man with the wind instrument said it could not be played
because it contained quarter-tones and would be out of tune. We
were not at all convinced by this, and one day, when we were
staying with a Galway friend who is a learned musician, I asked him
to listen to our verses, and to the way we spoke them. The
Visionary found to his surprise that he did not make every poem to
a different tune, and to the surprise of the musician that he did
make them all to two quite definite tunes, which are, it seems,
like very simple Arabic music. It was, perhaps, to some such music,
I thought, that Blake sang his Songs of Innocence in Mrs.
Williams’ drawing-room, and perhaps he, too, spoke rather
than sang. I, on the other hand, did not often compose to a tune,
though I sometimes did, yet always to notes that could be written
down and played on my friend’s organ, or turned into
something like a Gregorian hymn if one sang them in the ordinary
way. I varied more than the Visionary, who never forgot his two
tunes, one for long and one for short lines, and could not always
speak a poem in the same way, but always felt that certain ways
were right, and that I would know one of them if I remembered the
way I first spoke the poem. When I got to London I gave the
notation, as it had been played on the organ, to the friend who has
just gone out, and she spoke it to me, giving my words a new
quality by the beauty of her voice.

III

Then we began to wander through the
wood of error; we tried speaking through music in the ordinary way
under I know not whose evil influence, until we got to hate the two
competing tunes and rhythms that were so often at discord with one
another, the tune and rhythm of the verse and the tune and rhythm
of the music. Then we tried, persuaded by somebody who thought
quarter-tones and less intervals the especial mark of speech as
distinct from singing, to write out what we did in wavy lines. On
finding something like these lines in Tibetan music, we became so
confident that we covered a large piece of pasteboard, which now
blows up my fire in the morning, with a notation in wavy lines as a
demonstration for a lecture; but at last Mr. Dolmetsch put us back
to our first thought. He made us a beautiful instrument half
psaltery half lyre which contains, I understand, all the chromatic
intervals within the range of the speaking voice; and he taught us
to regulate our speech by the ordinary musical notes.

Some of the notations he taught us,
those in which there is no lilt, no recurring pattern of sounds,
are like this notation for a song out of the first Act of The
Countess Cathleen.

It is written in the old C clef,
which is, I am told, the most reasonable way to write it, for it
would be below the stave on the treble clef or above it on the bass
clef. The central line of the stave corresponds to the middle C of
the piano; the first note of the poem is therefore D. The marks of
long and short over the syllables are not marks of scansion, but
show the syllables one makes the voice hurry or linger over.

One needs, of course, a far less
complicated notation than a singer, and one is even permitted
slight modifications of the fixed note when dramatic expression
demands it and the instrument is not sounding. The notation which
regulates the general form of the sound leaves it free to add a
complexity of dramatic expression from its own incommunicable
genius which compensates the lover of speech for the lack of
complex musical expression. Ordinary speech is formless, and its
variety is like the variety which separates bad prose from the
regulated speech of Milton, or anything that is formless and void
from anything that has form and beauty. The orator, the speaker who
has some little of the great tradition of his craft, differs from
the debater very largely because he understands how to assume that
subtle monotony of voice which runs through the nerves like
fire.

Even when one is speaking to a
single note sounded faintly on the Psaltery, if one is sufficiently
practised to speak on it without thinking about it one can get an
endless variety of expression. All art is, indeed, a monotony in
external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of
gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination.
But this new art, new in modern life I mean, will have to train its
hearers as well as its speakers, for it takes time to surrender
gladly the gross efforts one is accustomed to, and one may well
find mere monotony at first where one soon learns to find a variety
as incalculable as in the outline of faces or in the expression of
eyes. Modern acting and recitation have taught us to fix our
attention on the gross effects till we have come to think gesture
and the intonation that copies the accidental surface of life more
important than the rhythm; and yet we understand theoretically that
it is precisely this rhythm that separates good writing from bad,
that is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of all intense
literature. I do not say that we should speak our plays to musical
notes, for dramatic verse will need its own method, and I have
hitherto experimented with short lyric poems alone; but I am
certain that, if people would listen for a while to lyrical verse
spoken to notes, they would soon find it impossible to listen
without indignation to verse as it is spoken in our leading
theatres. They would get a subtlety of hearing that would demand
new effects from actors and even from public speakers, and they
might, it may be, begin even to notice one another’s voices
till poetry and rhythm had come nearer to common life.

I cannot tell what changes this new
art is to go through, or to what greatness or littleness of
fortune; but I can imagine little stories in prose with their
dialogues in metre going pleasantly to the strings. I am not
certain that I shall not see some Order naming itself from the
Golden Violet of the Troubadours or the like, and having among its
members none but well-taught and well-mannered speakers who will
keep the new art from disrepute. They will know how to keep from
singing notes and from prosaic lifeless intonations, and they will
always understand, however far they push their experiments, that
poetry and not music is their object; and they will have by heart,
like the Irish File, so many poems and notations that they will
never have to bend their heads over the book to the ruin of
dramatic expression and of that wild air the bard had always about
him in my boyish imagination. They will go here and there speaking
their verses and their little stories wherever they can find a
score or two of poetical-minded people in a big room, or a couple
of poetical-minded friends sitting by the hearth, and poets will
write them poems and little stories to the confounding of print and
paper. I, at any rate, from this out mean to write all my longer
poems for the stage, and all my shorter ones for the Psaltery, if
only some strong angel keep me to my good resolutions.

- 1902.

Magic

Magic

I

I believe in the practice and
philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must
call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are,
in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth
in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe
in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from
early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical
practices. These doctrines are

- (1) That the borders of our minds
are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another,
as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single
energy.

- (2) That the borders of our
memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one
great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

- (3) That this great mind and
great memory can be evoked by symbols.

I often think I would put this
belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to
imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all
sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes
from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind
that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.